PROFILES WHIRLWIND How the filmmaker Mira Nair makes people see the world her way. T o get to the director Mira Nair's house in Kampala, Uganda, you fol- Iowa single-lane highway north from Entebbe, dogleg right at the roundabout as you enter town, pass a service station where a sign announces "TOIlETS NOW HALF OPEN," and proceed south toward the once unfashionable section called Buziga Hill, where real-estate prices have tripled since 1990, when Nair and her husband, the scholar Mahmood Mam- dani, bought their two-acre property for about seventy thousand dollars. As Nair barrels along in a secondhand green Toy- ota RA V 4, the road is an embodiment of the extremes in which her :films revel--a confusion of enterprise and collapse, of modernity and tradition. On either side, raggedy shops are jammed together like rows of bad teeth. We pass Harrod's T ai- lors, a shipping container that's now a haberdashery. "People here use every- thing," Nair says. "There are no frip- peries." Boys ride bicycles with fringed back seats; women hurry to work in col- orful gomesi, weaving past swarms of boda-bodas-passenger motorcycles--and reckless matatus, the Volkswagen vans that ferry Ugandans around town; red dust rises from cfu-t roads that meander off into subtropical vegetation. By a rusted sign for the Kiwumulo Country Club ("Cold Beers, Soda, Snacks-Soft Music in Background"), Nair hangs a sharp right. The car jounces up a rutted road that winds a mile and a h past shanties and the orange-roofed cinder-block vul- garities that have sprung up like gigantic barbed-wire mushrooms, to her house. Nair, who divides her time among Kam- pala, New York, and New Delhi, found her modest bungalow, which has a mag- nificent view of Lake Victoria, while scouting locations for her second feature, "Mississippi Masala." "} was looking for something unforgettable," she says. "Like Marilyn Monroe is shorthand for sex, I wanted somethIng you could be nostal- gic for. The sun was falling. It was a com- 100 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 9, 2002 BY JOHN LAHR plete ruin. I fell in love with it instand " "Enjoy every part of the frame and make it pulsate with life," Nair tells her students at Columbia University's :film school, where she is an adjunct professor. Her own frames are crammed with the contrasting textures of sight, sound, and sociology; and she often invokes André Gide's dictum that tyranny is the absence of complexi "I have an eye and ear for paradox," she has said. "That is life-the gray area where no one person is less or . th th th " N . ( " I ' more VIrtuous an e 0 er. arr t s Nair like 'fue' ") exudes a cheeky dyna- mism that, in an earlier age, would have earned her the label of "bright spark" In 2000, she took on the seemingly lunatic task of making a :film in thirty days in New Delhi, with a cast of sixty-eight and a budget of $1.2 million. Two years later, "Monsoon Wedding," a joyflli and lyrical dissection of a Punjabi family and an upper-middle-class arranged marriage, has become the eighth-highest-grossing foreign :film of all time in the United States. (Nair is planning a musical adap- tation, which she will direct on Broad- wa ) The movie took the top prize at last year's Venice International Film Festival, and its popularity accounted for why Nair's Chelsea production company, Mirabai Films, had been approached with three new proposals: a Ted Hughes- Sylvia Plath bio-pic, and film adap- tations of Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch" and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." It was why Carsey- Werner- Mandabach Produc- tions, which brought the world "Rose- anne" and "The Cosby Show/' had in- vited Nair to write a sitcom about an Indian-American family; and why Har- vard Universiì}r, which she attended in the late seventies, was planning to award her the 2003 Harvard Arts Medal. "To be a :filmmaker, you have to be diseased," Nair once said. She is, she ex- plains, "permanently afflicted." Among the many accomplishments of "Mon- soon Wedding," the most startling is that it conveys onscreen something that is palpable in Nair herself: what the Pun- jabis call masti-an intoxication with life. In :film, which she chose as her métier at the age of twenì}r, Nair has found a fonn "where I can embrace life completel " She is now forty-five, and her relish for the world around her is fuelled, in part, by the knowledge that three horoscopes have predicted that she'll die at sixty-- one. "I don't really believe it, but I don't forget it, either," she says. Nair, who is the youngest of three children reared in an upper-middle-class home in Bhubanes- war, a backwater--"remote even in Indian terms"-some two hundred and forty miles southwest of Calcutta, is a person of color, and she celebrates color. Whether she is showing us Bombay strippers in her documentary "India Cabaret" (1985), the racial divide between blacks and browns in the South in "Mississippi Masala" (1991), or even a white-trash Bayonne, New Jersey, no-hoper, who can't get a date (played, improbably; by Uma Thur- man) in the HBO movie "Hysterical Blindness" (2002), Nair's :films negotiate disparate ethnic geographies with the same kind of sly civility she practices in life. Her approach is sometimes oblique: she doesn't make political :films, but she does make her :films politicall Her gift, to which "Monsoon Wedding" attests, is to make diversity irresistible. Nair is, above all, a populist--a mass communicator who actually maintains contact with the masses. When she was showing her 1996 erotic movie "Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love" in India, where cinemagoing is a vocal, largely male- dominated experience, she insisted that there be special screenings for women. Mter making "Salaam Bombay!" (1988), her audacious fust feature, about street children in India, she started the Salaam Baalak Trust, a program that now assists some four thousand homeless kids a year in India. "I have always been drawn to the stories of people who live on the margins